Beloved context

Question 1

Margret Garner

Answer 1

She escaped slavery by crossing the frozen Ohio River in 1856 with her children, and committed infanticide when found out that the marshals were looking for her.

Question 2

Neo-slave Narrative

Answer 2

A neo-slave narrative is a modern fictional work set in the slavery era by contemporary authors or substantially concerned with depicting the experience or the effects of enslavement in the New World.[10] The authors use their imagination, and research in oral histories and existing slave narratives to create such stories. Neo-slave narratives are written by authors whose focus is not the abolition of slavery, but the amelioration of the wounds it has left behind; they seek reconciliation with a past that still haunts the present.

Question 3

Reconstruction Era ( 1873)

Answer 3

America trying to find their identity (this could be seen in the American Civil war)

Question 4

Loss of Identity

Answer 4

Toni Morrison changed her own name because her peers had trouble pronouncing her name, so she began to go by a shortened version of Anthony, the name she chose at her Catholic confirmation

Question 5

Transatlantic slave trade

Answer 5

Sethe recalls a memory of the middle passage, which is not her own memory, instead a collective memory
Abolished across europe over the 1800s, was illegal in the North from 1854 but was not abolished in the south until 1863
10 million slaves involved - went on for 264 years.

Question 6

Importance of song- paul D details two-step dance the chain gang juxtaposing the “music” of the iron . The wording creates a cruel irony of the free-expressive nature of dance and music juxtaposes the limitations of the bindings. “They sang it out and beat it up”, as they chain dance over fields and trails, “garbling the words so they could not be understood”

Answer 6

Set between 1865 and 1874 (switches between years), in 1864 due to the North and South divide Harriet Tubman used song as a form of call and response to help the enslaved in the south escape to the north

Question 7

Magical Realism

Answer 7

Surreal, supernatural, dream-like quality

Question 8

Post-modernism

Answer 8

varying ideologies and interpretations

Question 9

Temporal distortion

Answer 9

rejects linear

Question 10

Morrison’s purpose in writing Beloved

Answer 10

• The history of slavery must not be forgotten.
• To ‘fill in the blanks that the traditional slave narrative left’ (The Site of Memory).
• Chronicles the psychological damage of slavery on men.
• Concentrates on an elaboration of female pain. The pain of not knowing one’s children, losing husbands, sexual exploitation.

Question 11

African archetypes

Answer 11

• Morrison’s work celebrates African archetypes.
• The Great Mother, nommo, the creative and sacred actualisation of nature. Great Mother can kill as well as create

Question 12

The Great Migration

Answer 12

• Movement of over 300,000 African American from the rural south into Northern cities between 1914 and 1920.